Search for Articles:
Title / Keyword
Author / Affiliation / Email
Journal
Article Type
 
 
Advanced Search
 
Section
Special Issue
Volume
Issue
Number
Page
 
3.6
1.6
Journals
Cryptography
Special Issues
Physical Layer Security and Trust for Legacy Systems and Supply...
share announcement

Physical Layer Security and Trust for Legacy Systems and Supply Chain Assurance

A special issue of Cryptography (ISSN 2410-387X). This special issue belongs to the section "Hardware Security".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2018) | Viewed by 47415

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Jim Plusquellic

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA
Interests: hardware security and trust and design for manufacturability
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Physical-layer security and trust of microelectronic systems is threatened by powerful side-channel signal acquisition attacks, semi-invasive probing and sophisticated reverse engineering process flows. Legacy systems are particularly vulnerable and the large investment in current deployments of cyber-physical systems across medical, military, industrial, and critical infrastructures makes it imperative that these systems are retrofit with countermeasures designed to improve their situational-awareness and resilience to attacks, such as illegal firmware updates and information theft through side-channels. Many of these systems are not resource-constrained and therefore a wide-range of opportunities exist to outfit these legacy systems with novel primitives and additional layers to harden their security inner and outer shells. Techniques that provide a root-of-trust through, for example, secure boot, and/or provide intra-SoC (system on a chip) security firewalls between IP blocks would further improve the resilience of both legacy and emerging systems. Similarly, methods that establish provenance and provide assurance of authenticity of chips and systems as they move through the supply chain would also greatly alleviate security concerns related to early-life failures and hidden back door access mechanisms in newly deployed systems. This Special Issue is seeking original works that address security and trust challenges across and/or within this range of topics.

The topics of interest to this Special Issue cover the scope of the IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) (http://www.hostsymposium.org/).

Extended versions of papers presented at HOST 2018 are sought, but this call for papers is also fully open to all those who wish to contribute by submitting a relevant research manuscript.

Prof. Dr. Jim Plusquellic
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Cryptography is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Physical-layer security
  • Side-channel countermeasures
  • Security and trust in legacy and emerging IoT
  • Supply chain assurance

Published Papers (6 papers)

Download All Papers
Order results
Result details
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

18 pages, 2098 KiB  
Article
Improving Performance and Mitigating Fault Attacks Using Value Prediction
by Rami Sheikh and Rosario Cammarota
Cryptography 2018, 2(4), 27; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography2040027 - 23 Sep 2018
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 6312
Abstract
We present Value Prediction for Security (VPsec), a novel hardware-only framework to counter fault attacks in modern microprocessors, while preserving the performance benefits of Value Prediction (VP.) VP is an elegant and hitherto mature microarchitectural performance optimization, which aims to predict the data [...] Read more.
We present Value Prediction for Security (VPsec), a novel hardware-only framework to counter fault attacks in modern microprocessors, while preserving the performance benefits of Value Prediction (VP.) VP is an elegant and hitherto mature microarchitectural performance optimization, which aims to predict the data value ahead of the data production with high prediction accuracy and coverage. Instances of VPsec leverage the state-of-the-art Value Predictors in an embodiment and system design to mitigate fault attacks in modern microprocessors. Specifically, VPsec implementations re-architect any baseline VP embodiment with fault detection logic and reaction logic to mitigate fault attacks to both the datapath and the value predictor itself. VPsec also defines a new mode of execution in which the predicted value is trusted rather than the produced value. From a microarchitectural design perspective, VPsec requires minimal hardware changes (negligible area and complexity impact) with respect to a baseline that supports VP, it has no software overheads (no increase in memory footprint or execution time), and it retains most of the performance benefits of VP under realistic attacks. Our evaluation of VPsec demonstrates its efficacy in countering fault attacks, as well as its ability to retain the performance benefits of VP on cryptographic workloads, such as OpenSSL, and non-cryptographic workloads, such as SPEC CPU 2006/2017. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Physical Layer Security and Trust for Legacy Systems and Supply Chain Assurance)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

32 pages, 3173 KiB  
Article
Comparison of Cost of Protection against Differential Power Analysis of Selected Authenticated Ciphers
by William Diehl, Abubakr Abdulgadir, Farnoud Farahmand, Jens-Peter Kaps and Kris Gaj
Cryptography 2018, 2(3), 26; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography2030026 - 19 Sep 2018
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 7708
Abstract
Authenticated ciphers, which combine the cryptographic services of confidentiality, integrity, and authentication into one algorithmic construct, can potentially provide improved security and efficiencies in the processing of sensitive data. However, they are vulnerable to side-channel attacks such as differential power analysis (DPA). Although [...] Read more.
Authenticated ciphers, which combine the cryptographic services of confidentiality, integrity, and authentication into one algorithmic construct, can potentially provide improved security and efficiencies in the processing of sensitive data. However, they are vulnerable to side-channel attacks such as differential power analysis (DPA). Although the Test Vector Leakage Assessment (TVLA) methodology has been used to confirm improved resistance of block ciphers to DPA after application of countermeasures, extension of TVLA to authenticated ciphers is non-trivial, since authenticated ciphers have expanded input and output requirements, complex interfaces, and long test vectors which include protocol necessary to describe authenticated cipher operations. In this research, we upgrade the FOBOS test architecture with capability to perform TVLA on authenticated ciphers. We show that FPGA implementations of the CAESAR Round 3 candidates ACORN, Ascon, CLOC (with AES and TWINE primitives), SILC (with AES, PRESENT, and LED primitives), JAMBU (with AES and SIMON primitives), and Ketje Jr.; as well as AES-GCM, are vulnerable to 1st order DPA. We then use threshold implementations to protect the above cipher implementations against 1st order DPA, and verify the effectiveness of countermeasures using the TVLA methodology. Finally, we compare the unprotected and protected cipher implementations in terms of area, performance (maximum frequency and throughput), throughput-to-area (TP/A) ratio, power, and energy per bit (E/bit). Our results show that ACORN consumes the lowest number of resources, has the highest TP/A ratio, and is the most energy-efficient of all DPA-resistant implementations. However, Ketje Jr. has the highest throughput. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Physical Layer Security and Trust for Legacy Systems and Supply Chain Assurance)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

19 pages, 986 KiB  
Article
Barrel Shifter Physical Unclonable Function Based Encryption
by Yunxi Guo, Timothy Dee and Akhilesh Tyagi
Cryptography 2018, 2(3), 22; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography2030022 - 31 Aug 2018
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 7784
Abstract
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are designed to extract physical randomness from the underlying silicon. This randomness depends on the manufacturing process. It differs for each device. This enables chip-level authentication and key generation applications. We present an encryption protocol using PUFs as primary [...] Read more.
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are designed to extract physical randomness from the underlying silicon. This randomness depends on the manufacturing process. It differs for each device. This enables chip-level authentication and key generation applications. We present an encryption protocol using PUFs as primary encryption/decryption functions. Each party has a PUF used for encryption and decryption. This PUF is constrained to be invertible and commutative. The focus of the paper is an evaluation of an invertible and commutative PUF based on a primitive shifting permutation network—a barrel shifter. Barrel shifter (BS) PUF captures the delay of different shift paths. This delay is entangled with message bits before they are sent across an insecure channel. BS-PUF is implemented using transmission gates for physical commutativity. Post-layout simulations of a common centroid layout 8-level barrel shifter in 0.13 μ m technology assess uniqueness, stability, randomness and commutativity properties. BS-PUFs pass all selected NIST statistical randomness tests. Stability similar to Ring Oscillator (RO) PUFs under environmental variation is shown. Logistic regression of 100,000 plaintext–ciphertext pairs (PCPs) fails to successfully model BS-PUF behavior. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Physical Layer Security and Trust for Legacy Systems and Supply Chain Assurance)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

18 pages, 1468 KiB  
Article
Hardware-Based Run-Time Code Integrity in Embedded Devices
by Taimour Wehbe, Vincent Mooney and David Keezer
Cryptography 2018, 2(3), 20; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography2030020 - 30 Aug 2018
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 8023
Abstract
Attacks on embedded devices are becoming more and more prevalent, primarily due to the extensively increasing plethora of software vulnerabilities. One of the most dangerous types of these attacks targets application code at run-time. Techniques to detect such attacks typically rely on software [...] Read more.
Attacks on embedded devices are becoming more and more prevalent, primarily due to the extensively increasing plethora of software vulnerabilities. One of the most dangerous types of these attacks targets application code at run-time. Techniques to detect such attacks typically rely on software due to the ease of implementation and integration. However, these techniques are still vulnerable to the same attacks due to their software nature. In this work, we present a novel hardware-assisted run-time code integrity checking technique where we aim to detect if executable code resident in memory is modified at run-time by an adversary. Specifically, a hardware monitor is designed and attached to the device’s main memory system. The monitor creates page-based signatures (hashes) of the code running on the system at compile-time and stores them in a secure database. It then checks for the integrity of the code pages at run-time by regenerating the page-based hashes (with data segments zeroed out) and comparing them to the legitimate hashes. The goal is for any modification to the binary of a user-level or kernel-level process that is resident in memory to cause a comparison failure and lead to a kernel interrupt which allows the affected application to halt safely. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Physical Layer Security and Trust for Legacy Systems and Supply Chain Assurance)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

14 pages, 2850 KiB  
Article
Non-Invasive Detection Method for Recycled Flash Memory Using Timing Characteristics †
by Sadman Sakib, Preeti Kumari, B. M. S. Bahar Talukder, Md Tauhidur Rahman and Biswajit Ray
Cryptography 2018, 2(3), 17; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography2030017 - 12 Aug 2018
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 7899
Abstract
Counterfeiting electronic components is a serious problem for the security and reliability of any electronic systems. Unfortunately, the number of counterfeit components has increased considerably after the introduction of horizontal semiconductor supply chain. In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate an approach [...] Read more.
Counterfeiting electronic components is a serious problem for the security and reliability of any electronic systems. Unfortunately, the number of counterfeit components has increased considerably after the introduction of horizontal semiconductor supply chain. In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate an approach for detecting recycled Flash memory. The proposed method is based on measurement of change in Flash array characteristics (such as erase time, program time, fail bit count, etc.) with its usage. We find that erase time is the best metric to distinguish a used Flash chip from a fresh one for the following reasons: (1) erase time shows minimal variation among different fresh memory blocks/chip and (2) erase time increases significantly with usage. We verify our method for a wide range of commercial off the shelf Flash chips from several vendors, technology nodes, storage density and storage type (single-bit per cell and multi-bit per cell). The minimum detectable chip usage varies from 0.05% to 3.0% of its total lifetime depending on the exact details of the chip. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Physical Layer Security and Trust for Legacy Systems and Supply Chain Assurance)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

17 pages, 3472 KiB  
Article
An Autonomous, Self-Authenticating, and Self-Contained Secure Boot Process for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays
by Don Owen Jr., Derek Heeger, Calvin Chan, Wenjie Che, Fareena Saqib, Matt Areno and Jim Plusquellic
Cryptography 2018, 2(3), 15; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/cryptography2030015 - 18 Jul 2018
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 8615
Abstract
Secure booting within a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) environment is traditionally implemented using hardwired embedded cryptographic primitives and non-volatile memory (NVM)-based keys, whereby an encrypted bitstream is decrypted as it is loaded from an external storage medium, e.g., Flash memory. A novel technique [...] Read more.
Secure booting within a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) environment is traditionally implemented using hardwired embedded cryptographic primitives and non-volatile memory (NVM)-based keys, whereby an encrypted bitstream is decrypted as it is loaded from an external storage medium, e.g., Flash memory. A novel technique is proposed in this paper that self-authenticates an unencrypted FPGA configuration bitstream loaded into the FPGA during the start-up. The internal configuration access port (ICAP) interface is accessed to read out configuration information of the unencrypted bitstream, which is then used as input to a secure hash function SHA-3 to generate a digest. In contrast to conventional authentication, where the digest is computed and compared with a second pre-computed value, we use the digest as a challenge to a hardware-embedded delay physical unclonable function (PUF) called HELP. The delays of the paths sensitized by the challenges are used to generate a decryption key using the HELP algorithm. The decryption key is used in the second stage of the boot process to decrypt the operating system (OS) and applications. It follows that any type of malicious tampering with the unencrypted bitstream changes the challenges and the corresponding decryption key, resulting in key regeneration failure. A ring oscillator is used as a clock to make the process autonomous (and unstoppable), and a novel on-chip time-to-digital-converter is used to measure path delays, making the proposed boot process completely self-contained, i.e., implemented entirely within the re-configurable fabric and without utilizing any vendor-specific FPGA features. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Physical Layer Security and Trust for Legacy Systems and Supply Chain Assurance)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:
 
Displaying articles 1-6
Back to TopTop